ANIMATED STARDUST English Writers’ Workshop Anandgram, Delhi 11-13 January 2001     It was a Delhi winter in Anandgram, with the mercury hovering between 9 and 11° centigrade. The mist hung heavy through the morning, lending a touch of unreality to the sculpture and pottery discreetly placed on the lawns, to soothe the eye and relieve the restless mind of the daily grind of the worlds we inhabit. The sun shone bright at moments, promising an illusion of warmth, while the charcoal braziers crackled merrily in the meeting hall and on the lawns outside. The murmur of women’s voices was constant, interrupted now and then with sharp bursts of laughter. Seventeen women, writers and the core team, met for three days, talking earnestly as they drew their shawls closer and stretched cold hands and feet towards the warmth of the fire. Moving from the cozy room to the lawns whenever the sun looked bright and deceptively warm, the group of women talked as they had never talked in such a gathering before. The intensity of the discussions was enough for one writer to declare that she couldn’t take three days of it. But the rest continued to speak with honesty, curiosity and eagerness in an attempt to sort out dilemmas and doubts that troubled them in the course of their writing. Many of these were issues most of them had hitherto not had the space to confront. The workshop for Indian women writing in English was interesting and significant at several levels. For one, it disproved many of our own assumptions about this category of writers. For another, it underlined the commonality of the concerns that women writers face, irrespective of the particular circumstances of their individual lives as well as the language they write in. We had expected the English workshop to be quite different from the other language workshops, mainly because of the socio-economic and cultural background generally associated with an Indian writer using the English language. The national and, often, global outreach of these writers tend to make them seem a class apart. We had also assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that English writers would be unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the forms of gendered censorship that come into play in the course of writing. As we talked, however, our wonder grew: it seemed incredible that a single word, “gender,” could draw so much of life, struggle and pain into its fold. What became clear in the course of the workshop was the fact that no amount of privilege can alter the difference made by gender to the process of writing, as well as to the acceptance of this writing. The fact that most of the participating writers were quite conscious of the multiple, subtle and complex ways in which gender influences their lives and their writing became clear from the very first session on the first day of the workshop. Manju Kak’s remark that “chai-pani * interruptions do not hamper my creative writing as much as they do my painting” immediately sparked off a lively discussion on “the interrupted nature of women’s lives,” as Rukmini Nair put it. Expressing surprise at Manju’s suggestion that interruptions were more disruptive of painting than of writing, several writers talked about the difficulties of resuming writing after an unwanted break. Volga pointed out that the words that came to her after an interruption were usually different, and not always better. On the other hand, said Menka Shivdasani, veteran poet Nissim Ezekiel claimed that he sometimes wrote better after being interrupted. This led to a discussion about possible gender-related differences in the interruptions that women and men experience, and in their responses to them. Shama Futehally pointed out that interruptions probably affect women writers more than their male counterparts, because most women tend to take their other daily duties as seriously as their writing. Ritu Menon agreed, saying: “The chore for which a woman is interrupted is usually connected to what is seen as her primary responsibility. With men this is not the case.” Vasanth Kannabiran provided a real-life example which illustrated this point. Her brother-in-law managed to steadily work towards his PhD during a period when they all lived together in a small house with young children. His mother expressed her admiration for his amazing ability to concentrate on his work, despite all the noise and activity around him, exclaiming, “He is Valmiki, living in an anthill.” According to Vasanth, when it was her turn to work towards her MLitt, she found herself unable to be a Valmiki. She was also criticised for trying to balance multiple roles instead of being content in her domestic one. “For a woman it is difficult to say what she does by choice and what is based on her conditioning,” she pointed out. It was clear from the discussions that few women – even within this relatively privileged group—enjoy the luxury of setting aside time and space for writing without distraction. Most writers agreed that this reality had a bearing on the process and form of their writing, as well as on the quantum of work they are able to do. Family responsibilities, especially childcare duties, obviously limited the amount of time as well as the physical, mental and emotional space available to them for writing. Several writers stressed the fact that the priority they accorded their families in general, and their children in particular, was a matter of personal choice, and that it provided them with tremendous joy and satisfaction. But even they acknowledged the constraints that this places on their writing. According to Shama, for many years she could find only about 40 minutes a day in which to write. At another level, marital and professional status clearly affect the lives of women writers in very real, albeit different, ways. For instance, the financial pressures brought on by divorce have compelled at least two writers—Anuradha Marwah Roy and Ritu Bhatia -- to sacrifice time for creative writing in the interest of earning a decent living. On the other hand, Ruchira Mukherjee implied that divorce and childlessness, have given her relatively more time for writing, helping her make up for the fact that she has a full-time job in the government. According to Menka, as a young woman she had been advised by senior writers not to get married if she wanted to be a serious writer. But she thinks it is the “the spin of domesticity rather than marriage per se that gets you, despite privilege”, that is the problem. Combined with a full-time career, it has led to fewer poems than she might otherwise have written. “It has been ten years since my last book,” she said. “I am just about ready with my next one now.” Obviously the demands of journalism and creative writing are very different: As a journalist I write quickly and efficiently, always meeting deadlines; as a poet I take forever—it was 12 years before I was ready to publish my first book of poems.” Stet One year of marking paragraphs and time, deleting words, adding commas, rewriting the homeopathy and gardening columns. One year of fungus sprouting from ears, eyes, tongue, one year of feeling like mouldy bread full of holes. Good to collect Monthly four-figure pay, Buy a new pair of jeans, Hide the fungus Growing on the thigh. Till you feel like a bit of copy Yourself-cleaned, pruned, Computer-processed in black and white, Tucked away on the inside pages Of a world you never made. Turn to the original. Some sub-editor there marked it STET. -- Menka Shivdasani Rukmini Bhaya Nair added another dimension to the discussion by pointing out that interruptions were integral to women’s lives and profoundly influenced their modes of expression and communication. According to her, human beings are natural story-tellers, but there are different ways of telling a story. The narrative mode is linear (as in A,B,C,D), with a strong pull towards closure. The alternative, conversational mode follows a more open-ended and “interruptive” structure (as in A,B,A,C). She sees the former as a male, masculine form, and the latter as a more female, feminine form of story-telling and, therefore, of writing: “Breaking the linear structure of the narrative is part of our gendered nature,” she suggested. In her view, the impulse for this emerges partly from the interruptions that mark women’s lives but also, partly, from that fact that in women, more than men, the left and right sides of the brain communicate with each other, enabling them to be both verbal/emotional and logical/rational. She pointed out that there was no scientific basis to the view of women as palpitating, emotional beings, incapable of rational thought. This led to a discussion on the emotional content of women’s writing, with some writers contending that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that more women than men tend to openly discuss and write about emotions and relationships (the ‘private’ sphere). Agreeing with them, Rukmini explained that for her, the problem arose if this was seen as their primary, or even only, mode of expression. On the one hand, there is a stereotype about women’s writing dealing almost exclusively with the world of emotions, on the other hand, in the hierarchy of literary and intellectual values, “emotional writing” is seen as inferior. Rukmini’s own non-fiction book, Technobrats, about students of engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology where she teaches, was criticised by a reputed reviewer for being “too kind” to her subjects and, in fact, revealing her fondness for “the brutes”. It was almost as if the reviewer was disappointed that an academic of standing should be so charitable towards such a group of young persons and, worse, show her ‘motherly’ feelings in her writing. According to her, another aspect of the book that is also possibly gendered, and that may have disturbed some reviewers and fellow scholars, was the fact that it was a deliberately collective effort, with the writer and her subjects collaborating in writing it. People are used to singular narratives, unfamiliar with joint tellings. Yet, she pointed out, Stephen Hawking has written about “cosmic censorship”, which is against singularity, and has built multiplicity into our ways of being and ways of seeing. As Ritu Menon pointed out, on the one hand, harshness or destructiveness is seen as more acceptable in a man than in a woman. On the other hand, softness or tenderness in a woman is seen as proof of her inability to be a true professional. The conflict between ‘the ethics of caring’ (socially associated with the feminine) and ‘the ethics of justice’ (seen as primarily masculine) is particularly piquant, now that so many women occupy both domains and thereby find themselves on an embattled stage, fighting for justice and, at the same time, immersed in nurturing. As the discussion turned towards those subjects that women wanted to write about but felt that they could not, some echoes were heard from the earlier workshops in regional languages. Among the “areas of evasion”, as one writer so aptly it, were—predictably—sex and sexuality. Some of them felt that it was far easier to write on these subjects in English than in regional languages because the vernacular terms sound more explicit and, therefore, more coarse. However, almost all of them agreed that, for one reason or another, they found themselves constrained when writing on these subjects. Our society still prefers to regard women as almost “asexual” beings who are not expected to enjoy sexual activity. As one writer said, “We still consider it good (for women) to be frigid…” and, therefore, “We refrain from dealing openly with sex and sexuality.” When they do deal with the subject, women writers have to put up with a range of negative reactions. Ruchira recalled that although there was only one reference to sex in her novel, it was enough for her colleagues to start looking at her in a different light. Through the discussion, two reasons emerged as overriding inhibiting factors when it comes to writing on sexuality. Interestingly, most of the participants saw these reasons as being internally, rather than externally imposed, restraints. One was the deep-seated need to retain one's “dignity” (described by one writer as “the single most important virtue of an Indian woman”) even while writing about such an intensely personal and private experience. “I don't like to expose myself,” said Sujatha, “therefore I can't write about sex.” Some participants spoke of making… strategic choices… about what to write and how to write it, others kept sexuality out of their work for the sake of family and friends. The unease of being identified with the characters they wrote about was ever-present. Anita Nair spoke about her first collection of short stories which was dubbed ‘erotic’ by the media, although she herself had never seen her writing as being that. The publication of that book and the reviews it received made some difference to some friendships, she said, recalling how, after reading the book, “a couple of my men friends turned up at the door while my husband was away”. The other reason for inhibition was the difficulty of arriving at the appropriate “language” to write about this subjects. “I don't write about sexuality, not because I allow any external censors to operate, but because I haven't found the language for it,” explained Ruchira who, like some others, also felt inhibited because she didn't want to “discard a genteel past” and come across as “crude”. Maintaining respectability through language thus became a critical factor. The writers felt they had to write extra carefully and “with dignity” so that the “writings may be erotic but never pornographic”. The pervasive fear was that they might either romanticize sex or sensationalize it, when neither was desired. Or, like Jaishree, choose to deal with sex and sexuality “in a comic mode,” as in her novel-in-progress. While, on the one hand, participants said that in many ways it was easier to write on the subject in English rather than the regional languages, there was obviously a flip side to this as well. So much has already been written on sex and sexuality in English, internationally, that finding a new way of writing about the same issues is extremely difficult. To this extent, they felt, it is actually more complex to write on the subject in English. As Anuradha pointed out, “There already exists an ‘international treatment’ of these topics and much of it is very sophisticated and sensitively done.” And then there was another limitation of language: the use of words that almost always describe patently patriarchal attitudes. This was one of the reasons for Anuradha's current dilemma. Her next book deals with the trauma of gang rape. How will she write about rape? Where are the right words to describe it? For that matter, where are the appropriate words for women writers when it comes to expressing abuse or writing on violence? Rukmini, who believes abuse to be the “teeth and claw” of language, necessary for breaking taboos and therefore essential to writing, said that language “needs abuse words for women writers to express their anger”. Existing terms which express anger and violence are terms which men have created, and are mostly derogatory to women. But can language be transformed? Perhaps, suggested the writers, it is time to evolve new strategies to deal with the problem of language, including abuse. Some ways of doing this were proposed, among which were the revival of old, forgotten, grandmothers' terms of abuse; the reinvention of old ones to create new ones and, finally, changing the very connotations of existing terms and words. It was pointed out that many regional languages were already doing this. Terms like “my little prostitute,” which were once used as terms of endearment for female children by loving mothers and grandmothers, are now being reintroduced. A lively debate on literature and globalisation took place during a late evening session. The impetus for the discussion came from two sources: the analysis of globalisation and the international publishing market presented in The Power of the Word; and the general sentiment voiced in our earlier workshops concerning the relatively greater reach and visibility of English language writing in India, vis-à-vis other Indian languages. Where does this leave the women who, as Ruchira said so succinctly, “are excluded by class, excluded by gender and excluded by language?” Of course, she was speaking of these multiple exclusions in the context of her experience as an urban, upper middle class writer in English, but her point was well taken. English hegemony? The marginalisation of other languages by English— a metropolitan language with powerful links to the global literary and publishing community— was pointed out by Volga. According to her, “The space for regional language writing is shrinking rapidly because fewer and fewer people are reading books in local languages (specifically Telugu), thanks to the growing trend towards education in English.” As a result, cultural spaces, too, are diminishing. The global market plays an important role in this process. Are we, she asked, “moving towards a monoculture in creative writing”? Others— Menka, Manju, Ruchira and Rukmini— pointed out that although English might have high visibility in the national context, thanks to media attention and the clout it enjoys as a world language, returns for authors writing in English were much lower than those producing literature in other languages. Large advances apart (which only a few writers can hope for, in any case), sales seldom crossed 2,000-3,000 copies in English, compared to several thousands in many other languages; and English writers seldom experienced the adulation and popularity among readers that regional language writers enjoy. Could any of the writers present, for example, hope to receive the kind of attention or warmth and affection from readers that, say, Mahasweta Devi, or M.T Vasudevan Nair or Balamani Amma, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, and even younger writers like Volga and Mrinal Pande, do? So, is it a case of high visibility, low returns for English, and low visibility, high returns for the others? Menka made the important point that, as far as poetry is concerned, the question of privileging English simply does not arise, because it does not have the kind of committed readership that the same form has in the other languages. Sujatha agreed vehemently, saying, “The voices of poets are totally silenced in English. I feel totally drowned out, completely censored. I might as well lie down and die.” At another level, Ruchira, Kavery, Menka, Anuradha and Rukmini spoke about the incomparable loss they felt at not being able to write in anything but English. “I long to write in Hindi,” said Ruchira, to feel “connected.” According to her, the loss of communication she experienced by writing in English is keenly felt as the loss of an emotional link with her subject. Her sentiments were echoed by Kavery. Anuradha had an interesting response to this when she said that she, too, “longed to write in Hindi” until she began to write television scripts in Hindi — and then she longed for English! In her view, “I can never communicate the entirety of my experience in one language. My world resides in two or three languages, and I can’t get away from that.” This raised the question of how one writes hybridity and hyphenated being in another language, but it remained just a question. Transnational publishing The other issue that came up for discussion was transnational publishing and its implications for women writers. If the space for innovative writing is shrinking, what happens to those who do not conform to the demands of the market? What happens to the dissenting voice? And, relatedly, how do we speak of culture, censorship and voice in a globalised market? Ritu Menon pointed out that even though the market was quite powerful— and may, in fact, be shrinking for some kinds of writing— there is a space for women writers in all languages. More in some, less in others, but women have, willy-nilly, entered and claimed that space as a consequence of several factors. First and foremost, the space in the market, worldwide, was created by a band of feminist publishing professionals who set up their own presses and proved that not only was there a readership for women’s writing, representing a vast market waiting to be tapped, but there were many, many women writers waiting to be taken seriously by publishers. Ironically, it is the very success of women’s presses in popularising women writers and making them profitable that, in a way, has made for their own dislodgment by bigger, mainstream publishers. One outcome of this is that the space for feminist writing, or subversive writing, is disappearing worldwide, and that space may now be taken over by the Shobha Des and Pinki Viranis of the day. The discussion then moved to how Indian women writers can be— and are— successfully marketed in the international market, and the impact this may have on their creative writing. It was felt that, from the point of view of individual writers, this opening up of the market is a positive development. For Indian women writing in English, the market has opened up post-Arundhati Roy. The flip side is that even these writers may be required to conform to one or other of the formulae suggested by the successes of Arundhati Roy (internationally) and Shobha De (nationally). Apart from that, the globalised market has no space for books by other Indian women in translation, ostensibly because the ‘culture’ they present, more than the language itself, is too difficult to ‘translate’. At the same time, the market for books in Indian languages is shrinking because of the homogenising impact of globalisation, especially on young people, who are increasingly turning away from their own languages and towards English. Publishers— especially large, multinational ones— build up markets for a certain kind of writing by, for example, deciding that certain genres are preferable to others. So, novels are rated higher than short stories which, in turn, are “better” in marketing terms than poetry. Demands are made on writers to produce a more “market friendly” kind of writing, easy on the mind and on the pocket. Certain issues, too, become marketable in unexpected ways: one example was a recent book, Bitter Chocolate, on child sexual abuse by Pinki Virani, published by Penguin, which gained from media hype while another book on the subject, published by the RAHI Collective (a group working with survivors of incest), received hardly any attention— a case of a non-commercial book in English being marginalised in the commercial market. Does this mean that a subtle kind of market ‘censorship’ is being imposed on what we write? Some participants— Ruchira, Anita and Kavery, whose books have been published internationally— suggested that even though they hadn’t done so, once writers achieve a certain kind of ‘success,’— perhaps by ‘compromising’ a little on their writing— they could then be more assertive in subsequent work. Not everyone agreed that this was possible and, in any case, they felt good writing is not about conforming but about pushing the boundaries, and about speaking out. According to some participants, a writer’s— and especially, a woman writer’s— mission is to break the silence, to be the voice of change. Community of peers One of the last issues to be discussed was the question of building up a community of peers. Several writers pointed out that the literary establishment and the institutions it supports are difficult for women writers to penetrate and influence, because they are so deeply patriarchal and overwhelmingly male-dominated. Ritu mentioned that participants in several workshops had expressed the desirability of a forum in which issues of the range discussed during these workshops could be further explored. Participants in the Bengali writers’ workshop had already taken definite steps towards the formation of a group of their own, called “Shoi” (meaning both `signature’ and `myself’). Apart from providing a space for discussions of special concern to women writers, they thought a unified presence would help them find their voice in the exclusive world of Bengali literature. Ammu Joseph, Gouri Salvi Ritu Menon, Vasanth Kannabiran Workshop Co-ordinators Partcipants: 1. Anita Nair ( 35 yrs.) novels 2. Anna Sujatha Mathai (67 yrs.) poetry 3. Anuradha Marwah Roy (38 yrs.) novels 4. Jaishree Misra ( 40 yrs.) novels 5. Kaveri Nambissan (50 yrs.) novels 6. Manju Kak (48 yrs.) short stories 7. Menka Shivdasani ( 39 yrs.) poetry 8. Ritu Bhatia (35 yrs.) short stories 9. Ruchira Mukherjee (50 yrs.) short stories, novels 10. Rukmini Bhaya Nair ( 48 yrs.) poetry, editorial writing. 11. Shama Futehally ( 48 yrs.) short stories, novels, translation. The Perfect Ten First, the razor slash across the page, headlines and intros black upon the face, grey matter neatly sliding into place. Next, the calm of the anonymous wife, quiet, the mangalsutra shaping her life, along with the sindoor, the chain, the kitchen knife. Third, benevolent mother, sacrificing all, picking out lice, playing doll, knowing only too well what it is to feel small. Fourth, the frozen vegetable wilting in the heat, coupled with the redness of very raw meat; cook them together—so good to eat. Fifth, and here, the picture gets confusing. She’s supposed to be a winner, what is she losing, playing this game that’s not of her choosing? Perhaps—and this is six—she is truly a slut, her mouth wide open, eyes clenched shut, olivious to each lash, every cut. Seven, eight, lay her straight. Catch her quick before it’s too late, or she crosses the sell-by date. One short, the witch on the winding stair, bats like buckles upon the hair, hold her—she’s going—caught her—there! Ten—oh what a terrible shame! She’s lost herself, and there’s no one to blame But you have to admit, it’s a fantastic game. Now, count backwards. Explode. Menka Shivdasani
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